Last week, Sea Loft welcomed Canadian poet and interdisciplinary artist, Angela Rawlings (A.K.A. a.rawlings). Angela visited Sea Loft with French student and current collaborator Laureen Burlat. During their stay they explored the inception of a new performance based work, derived from the language of morse code. While painting away, I was privileged to be an audience of one at their first study and the photograph shows the results of a further run-through traced onto Kinghorn beach.

Following an enjoyable and insightful chat about my own practice, Angela was very kind to share her thoughts about my work in a short text. I’ve included what she wrote below and you can discover more of her own fascinating work by clicking on the link:

I sit in the Sea Loft at Kinghorn on a sunny February afternoon, watching freight and oil ships traverse the Firth of Forth, an estuary of the North Sea. To the east, I can see two offshore oil rigs, stout and towering from their ocean perches. To the south, I can see the Lothian coastline stretching like a mirrored inversion of my view in Reykjavík of the Reykjanes peninsula. Mid-peninsula, a volcanic point and then at the end, choppy cresting hills. Flat between. Lava field or farmland?

The practice of an artist, at times, engages a slower speed and repetition. Michael Craik’s studio sits beside Elizabeth Ogilvie’s in the Sea Loft at Kinghorn, where he works with endurance painting techniques that experiment with how hues stretch and distort over time. For serial work with titles such as Vestige and Trace, Craik paints aluminum with acrylic; once it dries, he layers the paint repeatedly up to fifty times. Then he sands down the edges of his canvas, revealing paint sedimentation through the process. His canvases drip-dry around their edges, the thick paint forming stalactites. In his newest experiments, Craik paints paper with monochromatic watercolour, then dips half the paper into a bucket of water. The paint streaks, revealing striated and occasionally winging dispersion of colour as it soaks down the canvas. Craik repeats his processes on his different canvases, using a variety of monochromes and variously sanding or water-dipping. Aluminum, sand, sedimentation, stalactites, water, water, water. The geomorphology of his practice reveals an interplay of human mark with material logic.